Ever since the rumor surrounding a number of different Nexus devices were to be announced and released throughout 2012 – check out our Top Five – we’ve all been scratching our heads to see what Samsung would be doing. Of the two companies lucky enough to be graced with the Nexus program – HTC and Samsung – they’ve been granted the pleasure twice. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google are on their way to look elsewhere for their next flagship phone however, I don’t think they’d want to leave such a big partner out in the cold. Rumors surfaced around the GT-i19260 model number in August. Describing a device that would be little more than a spec bump above the original Galaxy Nexus and be Samsung’s part in the upcoming line up of Nexus phones. With a bump in processing speed from 1.2Ghz a core to 1.5Ghz a core.

Now, Pocketnow have secured a user-agent profile on an i9260 roaming the wilds and there’s interesting bits of information in there, for sure. The profile itself lists the device as running a screen resolution of 1280×720 which is basically what the G.Nex is running right now. As well as something that seems to have caused some confusion, the CPU is listed as “ARM11” which can’t be right because ARM11 was at the heart of the G1, certainly not something that Google or Samsung should be happy to ship in 2012. Of course, this hasn’t stopped Nokia shipping a phone powered on old technology – their PureView 808 camera come phone runs on ARM11. There’s been speculation as well that it could be a processor based on the Cortex-A11 ARM core – again this can’t be right considering this processing core has never existed.

Speculation aside – I’m certain that the model number here carries more weight than anything, Samsung are certainly a company of habit and they’ve been tweaking model numbers to show a variation of small bump for a long time now. There’s a reason the Galaxy S2 is the i9100 and the S3 an i9300, there massive leaps. However, the Galaxy S was the i9000 and the Nexus S an i9020 – small variation in model number, small variation of phone.

There’s some other rumor making its across the rumor seas, that this upcoming phone could well be called the Galaxy Premier. However, this would suggest then, that this device isn’t a Nexus device at all but another riff of the well-milked Galaxy line from Samsung. If this were to be a device from Samsung running stock Android but not a Nexus it could open the gates to manufacturers offering devices running stock without the whizz-bang features of their own flagships. We can dream, right?